Why Hackers Worry
This is from PaulGraham's essay "Good Bad Attitude". It is one of the essays from his book "Hackers & Painters" but has only recently been put online. I liked this quote:
This is why hackers worry. The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.